Bonding With Monsties: Monster Hunter Stories Review

Players: 1-2
Platform(s): Nintendo 3DS

The Monster Hunter franchise has long been known for giving the player the ability to work together with friends in hunting crazy and intimidating beasts. In Monster Hunter Stories, this entire concept is flipped on its head.

Somebody doesn't look happy!

Monster Hunter Stories is a game that is about forging bonds with monsters, rather than killing and hunting them. This spin-off is quite different from the rest of the franchise, playing more like a Pokémon-like take on the franchise in the form of a turn-based RPG and monster collecting. Things start peacefully enough, with your custom made hero living at home, working hard at becoming what’s known as a Rider. The initiation ceremony is coming up and you’re off with friends trying to find your own personal egg. Things come to a head, disaster strikes, friends part ways and you go on a quest to discover the cause for what’s called the Blight: a sort of curse that is causing monsters to act uncharacteristically hostile.

The story is relatively simple, but engaging enough to keep you going. It’s clear from the start that this game was geared towards kids, since none of the slightly deeper features are ever needed for progression. It wasn’t until after beating the game that I discovered there was also a tie-in anime released for kids, solidifying my thoughts. Don’t let the kiddy exterior fool you though. Under the relatively simple game and fairly silly and cookie-cutter story is a genuinely enjoyable game.

One of the many beautifully designed areas.

The first thing I noticed was that the beautiful Monster Hunter aesthetic is displayed wonderfully in Stories. The monster designs are as fun as ever, the towns and characters are creative and colorful and the detail is phenomenal considering the hardware limitations. There are, of course, sometimes noticeable low-quality textures and sometimes barren landscapes, but overall things look very good. It helps that the animations are fantastic in and out of battle as well. Couple that with plenty of well-done music and sound effects and you have a game with some of the best aesthetic I’ve seen in a 3DS game. My biggest complaint is that the 3D mode is mediocre. I feel like they didn’t work too hard on making the depth detection good, since it’s barely passable. This is especially disappointing since the main Monster Hunter series usually offers a pretty solid 3D mode.

As you walk around, riding your Monstie and taking in the sights, you’ll notice that the game controls are entirely designed for the Circle Pad Pro. You use the Circle Pad to control movement and the D-pad to control the camera. This means it’s nigh impossible to control both at the same time. With a CPP the camera control is delegated to the right Circle Pad, making things far more intuitive. You can use the L or R buttons to rotate the camera, but having free range movement can be important when looking for paths, secrets and especially when you’re flying. If you are playing on the New 3DS models, then you have nothing to worry about with its built in right Circle Pad. In battle, the controls are quite simple, and can be done with touch screen or with buttons. It really only consists of selecting attacks with the occasional interactive battle segment. Due to some of the ways the monsters move the controls can be a little clunky, but this was a minor annoyance in an otherwise easy to control game.

This Tigrex isn't very nice.

Since we’re on the subject of battles, let’s talk combat. The combat runs on a literal rock-paper-scissor format. You have three attack types: technical, power and speed. Technical trumps speed trumps power trumps technical. If you and the enemy happen to be targeting each other, then you get pitted in a head-to-head battle. If you two used the same attack type, then damage is dealt normally. If not, then the one with the winning attack type overwhelms the loser, minimizing the loser’s attack while increasing their own. If both you and your Monstie happen to target the same enemy and win the head-to-head, then you neutralize the enemy completely for a turn. As you progress the fight you fill up a Kinship meter, which allows you to ride your Monstie in the fight giving you the ability to perform a really powerful attack before dismounting. Your Monstie chooses attacks seemingly randomly, with only a semblance of intelligence. Not having control over your Monstie is the biggest frustration of the game, since often they’ll do something really dumb repeatedly forcing you into healing duty rather than combat duty.

It’s a relatively simple system and easy to grasp. As you do side quests and level up, you unlock special abilities for both you and your Monstie. These can cause status conditions or other interesting effects in battle, at the cost of some of your Kinship meter. You can actually control your Monstie by telling it what special skill to use, but since this removes Kinship level rather than raises it, it’s not often you’ll find yourself doing this. To add fuel to the fire, if your Monstie uses a special skill on its own, it doesn’t cost any Kinship. It’s a rather nice system, which is only marred by the stupidity of your partner’s AI. Even with that annoyance, I rarely had any real problems in the game. You can, of course, also use items in combat, flee or switch your active Monstie with any of the others in your party. The complexity doesn’t really have any importance to the game unless you decide to dabble in multiplayer.

The different equipment usually is designed based on a specific monster.

In the multiplayer mode, the rules change a little. The only way you can target the opponent Rider is through your Monstie. Riders themselves can only target the active Monstie. This forces a bit of strategy, and also allows for some more creative uses of items that you won’t necessarily experiment with in the game’s main story. Even though there are 100+ Monsties to choose from, there are only a handful of higher tiered creatures that are really viable in multiplayer since the rest are fairly weak. The multiplayer mode is turned into a novelty as a result, rather than a truly fun and competitive feature as it should have been.

As you explore the world of Monster Hunter Stories, you can enter randomly spawned and generated Monster Dens. At the end of each den you will get to a nest where you can acquire a semi-random monster egg, and is how you get new Monsties. Luckily, the dens aren’t very long so it never feels like a chore going on a hunt for a new buddy. While you’re doing all this you can gather materials to use for crafting items or for upgrading the tons of different gear you can get. Money is only handed out through the tons of side quests you can do. There are a lot of them, and they are extremely repetitive. There’s only about 4-5 different types of quests you can do, and it gets old fast. The side quests feel like nothing more than filler added for the sole purpose of creating an artificial extension of the play time. If they had cut down the number of side quests by about half, it would have been far more reasonable. The thing is, you need lots of money if you want to acquire and upgrade all the equipment in the game.

RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!

Upon beating the game, you’ll find a couple of extra quest lines to tackle that offer ample challenge for you, as well as a handful of new monsters to hatch. This helps add some value to the game after completion, without being overwhelming. Another positive point is that the DLC is all completely free, and there’s a bit of it. Half of it is cosmetic stuff, but the other half is special targets to defeat that end in new equipment. The most interesting is the one that involves a Zelda themed weapon and Link’s horse Epona as a usable monster. To add to that, there’s 100 hidden Poogie’s around the game for you to find, giving you plenty to do outside of the main story.

Monster Hunter Stories is stock full of content, filler and otherwise. It took me about 60 hours just to get through most of the main set of subquests, DLC subquests and main story. I’m currently working on perfecting a party for tackling the bonus content you get after beating the game, and figure I’ll put another 5-10 hours in before I’m done with it. There’s also an achievement system that’ll make people happy who are into it. By the time I finished the game with my relatively thorough play style, I had finished 70 out of the 100 total achievements. I have been completely satisfied with the amount of things there are to do in the game, and feel like I got way more than my money’s worth. There’s even amiibo support, though it doesn’t do much outside of giving you random items. If you import the extremely cute Monster Hunter Stories amiibo that only released in Japan for some reason, you can unlock some Monsties that coincide with the characters and focus a little on the anime aesthetic.

A lot of familiar faces for franchise veterans.

If you’re a fan of the Monster Hunter series, and are looking for a similar experience you probably will want to go elsewhere. While a lot of the monster’s conventions and patterns are retained and the aesthetic is entirely Monster Hunter, the game at its core is a completely different beast. If you want something that’s different, but enjoy the Monster Hunter universe, then this is a fantastic diversion to enjoy while we wait for Monster Hunter World to launch. If you don’t even care about Monster Hunter, but enjoy the idea of a relatively approachable monster collecting RPG that isn’t Pokémon, this is a fantastic choice. The best part is that if you’re on the fence, there’s a demo you can download that includes the first chapter in its entirety, and allows you to continue into the main game if you purchase it. It’s what I did, and it worked for me. I don’t regret a single minute I put into Monster Hunter Stories, and I look forward to many more hours as I work towards getting all the achievements.

- Teepu

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Graphics: AMAZING
Sound: AMAZING
Gameplay: AMAZING
Value: EXCEPTIONAL

OVERALL: AMAZING

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